George, my Beta fish, hates me, which is fine, really, because he’s a fish, and I think it’s kind of funny. George’s one of those really pretty, slightly mysteriously colored fish, whose scales shine bluish-black in the light, hanging like an ink drop in a clear pool of water. Like his scales, George's journey to my home radiates an enchanting mystery, too.
In a former life, I worked in the bookstore. Some random day, I glanced down while I was at the information desk. I blinked when I saw a fish. In a bowl. In a bookstore.
A black and white ribbon wrapped around the frilly rim of the bowl with an oversized, overly bright pink Gerbera daisy stuck in the middle of a bow's knot. Inside, a single fish, dark as night, swam still in the center.
I thought I must be seeing things, and asked a friend if she knew what was up with the fish. She said a customer left The Fish at the desk, because it’d been given to her as she’d been window-shopping. The customer said she'd have kept the pretty fish, but as she told the original fish-giver, “Um, I have cats.” Somehow, though, the situation clicked not with the free-fish-giver-away-er, and The Fish in the frilly bowl remained in the hands of some stuck person who couldn’t keep it, couldn't give it away.
The Fish (soon to be known as George) seemed a rather large Beta for such a small container. Given paper books and water don’t really mix well, we were told the fish had to be moved from the desk. That posed the question of what in the world are we going to do with The Fish, as the customer nowhere to be seen in her own sea of books. We could page her, maybe?
“Would the owner of a blue-black Beta please come to the information desk? We’re afraid the fish you don’t want, which your cats of as sushi, will topple his very small fishbowl and damage our books. We need The Fish and his bowl to go away. Now, preferably. Thank you, and thank you for shopping at our bookstore.”
Ok. Maybe not.
I’ve never had a fish before, and I have to admit, I was more than a little intrigued to have one so close. I’d eyed fish as possible future pets before; they were so entrancing, their colors flickering and quivering. Plus, they don’t have claws like cats, aren’t big enough to fill the kitchen floor when they stretch out like a particular dog I love; these are chief selling points. Seriously. The Fish was starting to look like he’d found a home.
Maybe. But, um, I have cats, too.
That bowl, the one with more cuteness allowed anything not a newborn? NOT coming home with me. Asking around, I found out that Betas like smaller spaces, and I knew we had containers at home that would work, but the question arose: how do I get The Fish from ugly-as-sin bowl A to home bowl B, half an hour away? Answer: Plastic cup C.
I filled the cup with filtered water from the café, but didn’t think to check the temperature of the water before I started encouraging The Fish into his new home. I really should have – because it was cold. So cold, The Fish started changing colors. I wasn’t really sure how to fix that or what to do about it.
Funny enough, none of the fish books I could easily locate talked about what to do when a blue-black Beta starts turning light blue-silver with angry red-orange fins, but I was pretty sure that was bad. I knew the heater in my car worked really well, so out to my car I scurried, a silvering-was-blue-black Beta fish with his proverbial scales chattering in tow.
Starting the engine, I set The Fish in the Cup into one of those handy cup holders just in front of one of the heater vents. Possibly killing the first fish I’ve ever had as a pet less than an hour into my actually having said fish seemed bad. So I turned the heater on low and sat there. Absently, the thought occurred to me. I'm probably the only person in Texas who wishes for more heat in the middle of spring.
The Fish flicked his tail at me, his fins sharpening into points as he pulsed angry, angry fish eyes at me. It was like he saw me, and blamed me, solely and entirely, for everything ever to happen to him since his birth in an ocean far, far away. I tried to talk to The Fish in the Cup, checked his color like a nervous habit, checked the temperature of the cup, tried to make sure he was still swimming, and hadn’t gone belly up. It was a long, awkward drive home.
Once home, The Fish shimmered more silver than even light blue, the tips of his fins sullenly orange red. I prepared another container for him, a simple glass bowl with a wide mouth, with distilled water at room temperature. The Fish was not pleased. He started swimming against the pull of gravity, having grown rather attached to his Cup with its designer coffee logo.
His fins and tail slashed through the water furiously. He was not going to leave his previously-unwanted home. I was not going to make him - not if he had any choice in the matter.
The Fish, being impressively obstinate and strong-finned, just kept swimming against flow, making it halfway up the cup before gravity won. He was beyond not pleased at this point, and sloshing water over the sides of the bowl not only as he entered the bowl, but as he swam around it.
My mom laughed, watching him swim around the edge of the bowl as if he were inspecting the perimeter of some untrusted, undisclosed location. I made every effort to keep him safe, but I was so limited in what I could use to help him. I knew he was mad, blaming me for messing with his world, but I couldn’t have left him where I found him, alone and unwanted.
My mom’s eyes warmed when she smiled, asking if I’d thought of a name. I hadn’t, what with the worrying about the water, The technicolor dream Fish, the Cup... She nodded. “Well, he’s red, white, and blue at the moment; why not George?” she asked.
So George, the fish who hates me, came to live with us.
It’s funny to say, but I love George. I really do. I know he’s just a single fish, and he’s not ever going to just swim happily up to me when he sees me. He doesn’t like me, but I still feed him and talk to him. He’s so pretty in his bowl, making bubble nests and being all fishy. He also explains God a little for me, too.
I tried the best I could, given the tools I had to work with, to help George when I brought him home. He has a home now, and will be safe for as long as he lives, but he still, months later, gets all sorts of riled up whenever I drop food into his bowl, or even come near where his bowl rests.
It’s sort of like Donald Miller said, “sometimes you have to see someone love something before you can love it yourself.” Only sometimes you have to try really, really hard to love someone, do everything you can to save them and make their lives better, only to be shown to disadvantage and blamed for all the discomfort which comes with changes and adjustments to understand you’re not the only one it happens to.
George just knows that I moved him from a place where he was happy to one where he was not happy, and then finally dumped him into some other place entirely new he had to completely learn. He doesn’t know Betas come from southern Asian countries and are bred to fight. He doesn’t care that his cousins live in rice patties, killed if they don’t swim fast enough or bite hard enough; he just knows that this big, unidentified being made him uncomfortable, then seriously mad, and now appears daily to toss more food into his bowl, making weird noises as she peers into a bowl he didn’t even ask for in the first place.
I’m not saying it doesn’t matter where we came from – from apes or dust. It does. It colors how we view each other, and that, again, affects our divine use-ability, too. We get so wrapped up in being right about what we believe or how we see the world, we forget that we are tiny beings. We forget what we can do with our lives matters most, as it echoes through eternity, in big or small ways.
At the end of the day, my life, like George’s, is not overly affected by where my cousins rest their heads. I swim in my pool, bewildered when food rains from the sky whether I ask for it or not, or when this oh,-so-much-larger-than-I Being tries to talk to me, using words I don’t understand. I can flounder and flash, trying to show I am so much larger and greater, or I can... not, accepting worlds and worlds of things I don’t understand exist and, though the thought terrifies me, trust all of it rests in hands capable of controlling it all.
